Did you know that July is Disability Pride Month? Celebration weeks and months can help shine a light on a community or particular lived experience and enable us to understand things from other people’s perspectives by learning from their stories.

Disability Pride Month grew out of the Disability Rights Movement in the United States and spread across the globe. It’s a time for disabled people to come together as a community, to share experiences and start conversations; a celebration of the creativity, resilience and achievements of disabled people.

Former Ghyama Arts Coordinator, now our Arts and Wellbeing Coordinator, Lara, explains below about a project that reflects our work around Disability Pride.

As it is Disability Pride Month, we wanted to take this opportunity to shine a light on an important project of ours. St Margaret’s House is home to the Bangladeshi Parents and Carers Association (BPCA), who use our Mulberry Hall as a specialist adult day centre every week from Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. We have worked closely with the BPCA over the past six years to deliver an empowering series of arts and wellbeing workshops to increase confidence and champion social inclusion for participants.

The BPCA is a specialist voluntary organisation working with people with multiple disabilities. The charity started as a family-led project in 1999 and went on to develop one of the largest Day Care centres in the voluntary sector in Tower Hamlets, with a second day centre in Newham which opened in 2011.

Through our collaborations with the BPCA we have encouraged participants to share their stories and experiences, creating pieces of theatre, film and circus.

St Margaret’s House’s collaboration with the BPCA began in 2020 as we set about delivering a three-year programme which would explore drama, film and circus each year – Ghyama Arts (Awesome Arts in Bengali). The programme was funded by City Bridge Foundation and enabled us to bring specialist companies in to work with the BPCA users and support workers, as well as half of the sessions being delivered by St Margaret’s House artists.

When the world shut down for COVID, we had to take the first round of workshops online - at a time when no one was sure how online drama workshops would work, we persevered and were so delighted to be able to keep the participants in touch with us and each other through creative sessions. For the participants, this offered connection in an isolating and vulnerable time.

Ghyama Arts provided online and in-person creative workshops with a different theme and form each term, (theatre, film and circus) but it was so much more than this. These sessions were about more than just performance skills, we made artworks for sharings, explored sound and audio pieces that were uploaded online and went on sensory journeys thinking about cooking or going to the shops independently. Ghyama Arts supported each participant to grow in confidence and feel empowered to make their own choices and decisions.

Throughout the five years of Ghyama Arts we worked in collaboration with other arts providers including Spare Tyre Theatre, Half Moon Theatre, Chocolate Films and practitioners from the National Centre of Circus Arts.

The BPCA’s words about the project say it best: “The arts activities provide a safe and welcoming space where individuals feel valued, heard and encouraged. Staff feel encouraged and take part. The professional artists have made a huge difference.”

Through Ghyama Arts, the BPCA service users became a theatre company where the members made choices and decided the outcome of each performance, they were actively engaged in the artwork being created each and every time

A highlight of this project was performing as part of Tower Hamlet’s Season of Bangla Drama in 2024 and 2025, a theatre festival celebrating Bangladeshi artists and creatives in the borough. Being part of the festival was incredible and emphasised the importance of culture and heritage within the group, from the facilitators to the participants. You can read more about Ghyama Arts here.

When the funding from City Bridge Foundation for Ghyama Arts came to an end, we were looking at ways to still collaborate with the BPCA, supporting their values and continuing to impact the participants’ lives. A fantastic opportunity was presented to us through a music therapy Masters placement from Nordoff & Robbins, the UK’s largest music therapy charity. The placement student was able to offer us six months of music therapy sessions to the community here at St Margaret’s House and other participants with whom we work throughout Tower Hamlets. He worked with a handful of different groups, from older adults to 12-month-old babies, all of which helped him grow as a therapist and shape his practice. For six months, he worked with the BPCA to run small group therapy sessions and 1-2-1 therapy for individuals who would benefit from that kind of therapeutic intervention.

Music therapy for BPCA participants was a new and exciting opportunity to access the arts. The student’s unique skill set provided fun and engaging sessions with songs in multiple languages and interesting instruments. He adapted each session to the participants, tailoring his delivery and language for each individual. During these months, it was incredible to watch how participants eagerly showed up to each session, providing new songs to sing and music to play. There were some participants who initially didn’t want to join in or create music but by the latter stages of the programme, they were actively engaged and turning up to sessions early. These sessions showed the importance of creativity as a tool to uplift confidence and independence. The focus of these sessions was different to Ghyama Arts, with an emphasis on the process rather than working toward a performance. This really allowed us to follow the participants’ lead, listening to what they wanted to do and giving time to each individual.

Through our collaboration with the BPCA we have empowered the participants and the staff to continue sessions independently of our support, such as circus activities. These past six years of collaboration have been fantastic in building confidence, independence and pride for everyone involved.

Learn more about Ghyama Arts here: https://www.stmargaretshouse.org.uk/ghyama-arts